Leadership Lessons from Ted Lasso What a Fictional Soccer Coach Can Teach Dental Practice Owners About Leading a Team

Dentistry and soccer would seem to have very little in common.

But if you’ve read much of what I’ve written, you know I’m fond of referring to dental practice as a team sport.

Until recently, most of what I knew about soccer came from watching my granddaughters play. Their performances, while enjoyable for a grandfather, weren’t particularly inspirational.

But, like so many others, I love Ted Lasso. And it has very little to do with soccer.

When I began thinking about why, I realized that beneath the humor is a remarkably good course in leadership.

And dentists may need that course more than most.

A soccer coach can have the best striker in the league and still lose if the defense breaks down. A dentist can be an extraordinary clinician and still have a struggling practice if the phone isn’t answered well, the schedule is chaotic, handoffs are weak, or the team has no idea where the practice is going.

Individual talent matters.

But in team sports, having the best individual talent doesn’t guarantee a championship.

People have to know their roles. They have to trust and complement one another, communicate and adapt when the game doesn’t go according to plan.

Most importantly, someone has to be watching the entire field.

That someone is the coach.

And in a dental practice, that means YOU.

Therein lies a problem.

We weren’t trained to coach.

In fact, much of our training teaches us to do almost exactly the opposite.

Think about how a dentist is educated.

Focus.

Look closer.

Then closer still.

Is that margin open?

Is the contact tight enough?

What’s happening with the occlusion?

Where are the forces being distributed?

What does the radiograph show?

What am I missing?

For years we’re trained to concentrate intensely on one patient and, quite literally, a few millimeters of that patient at a time.

That focus makes us good clinicians.

It doesn’t necessarily make us good leaders.

After spending more than a decade in classrooms and clinicslearning how to become dentists, we graduate, buy or start practices, hire employees and suddenly discover that we’re expected to lead a team.  Even as an associate, we still have tointeract with the front desk, hygienists and assistants.  We’re dependent on lab techs.

Nobody ever taught us how to pick our heads up and look at the entire field.

A practice owner requires an entirely different field of visionthan the one seen through their loupes.

You need what I’d call a triple focus:

The patient. The team. The business.

Miss any one of the three and eventually the others suffer.

Focus exclusively on the patient while ignoring the business and there may eventually be no practice in which to care for patients.

Focus on the business while ignoring the team and the culture begins to deteriorate.

Focus on the team while losing sight of the patient and we forget why the organization exists in the first place.

The challenge is that we were formally trained for only one of them.

The patient.

That’s one reason I find Ted Lasso so interesting.

On the surface, he’s an American football coach who knows almost nothing about soccer and is suddenly expected to lead an English soccer team.

There’s a dental equivalent.

We know an enormous amount about dentistry and frequently very little about leading the people who help us deliver it.

Ted can’t rely on being the smartest soccer tactician in the room.

So he relies on something dentists sometimes overlook while concentrating on margins, schedules and production.

People.

He pays attention to them.

He tries to understand them.

Most importantly, he looks beyond the persona they present to the world.

In the new series, when his assistant coach presents him with an exhaustive dossier about a player, Ted isn’t satisfied with the statistics.

He wants to know:

“What’s her story?”

That may be one of the most important questions a leader can ask.

Because the arrogant player may be deeply insecure.

The angry veteran may be frightened of becoming irrelevant.

And the employee we’ve labeled “difficult” may be carrying something we know absolutely nothing about.

Ted doesn’t begin with:

What’s wrong with this person?

He begins with:

What’s going on with this person?

There’s a significant difference.

Dentists are trained to diagnose.

We see a symptom and look for its cause.

Pain isn’t the diagnosis. Bleeding isn’t the diagnosis. Mobility isn’t the diagnosis.

We ask:

What’s causing it?

Yet when it comes to our teams, we frequently abandon the very diagnostic thinking that makes us good dentists.

“She’s resistant to change.”

“He doesn’t communicate.”

“She has a bad attitude.”

“They just don’t get it.”

Those aren’t necessarily diagnoses.

They may merely be symptoms.

Leadership requires the same curiosity we bring to the operatory.

What’s causing what I’m seeing?

That doesn’t mean tolerating poor behavior or avoiding accountability.

It means understanding the cause before reacting to the consequence.

And perhaps that’s where dentistry and soccer have the most in common.

The dentist is accustomed to looking down.

The coach has to look up.

A coach has to see the player with the ball, the player without the ball, the defense, the clock, the score and what’s developing on the other side of the field.

The practice owner has to learn to do the same.

Patient.

Team.

Business.

Every morning our team takes the field.

There’s a huddle, a schedule, assigned roles, handoffs and unexpected problems. There are good days and bad ones. Wins and losses.

And there is most definitely a scoreboard:

Production. Collections. New patients. Case acceptance. Profit.

Those numbers matter.

But leadership requires understanding what produced them.

Culture. Trust. Communication. Preparation. Accountability.

People.

Over the next several weeks, I’m going to use moments and characters from Ted Lasso to explore what they can teach those of us who own and lead dental practices.

Not because running a dental practice is exactly like coaching a soccer team.

But because leading human beings is remarkably similar wherever they happen to work.

Dental school taught us to become very good at looking closely.

Leadership requires another skill.

Knowing when to pick your head up and see the whole field.

Because in our game, we have to keep our eyes on three things at once:

The patient.
The team.
The business.

And unlike Ted’s scoreboard, ours doesn’t merely determine who wins or loses a game.

People’s health and livelihoods depend upon it.

Next week: BELIEVE — Why the Leader Has to Believe First.